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Iraq: End life, killed laughter

Salam Adil · 22:37

So says HNK. The world media seems to treat the Northern Iraqi city, Mosul, as more of a footnote their in the stream of news. Giving no more than a passing comments that the Iraqi prime minister declared a “decisive battle” to win back the city. When I read such headlines I know the human consequences will turn out to be horrific. So, today I dedicate my post to the extraordinary bloggers of Mosul who are living on the front line of a war zone. Also, one blogger writes on the conditions for women in Iraq and if you read to the end, you will find the mother of all bikers.

MSPaint Heart by Nadia N
“mspaint love” by nadia n

But First…

Here at Global Voices authors have a tradition of emailing birthday wishes to each other. In the same spirit I wish to send belated birthday greetings to Sunshine. She got the wish that every Iraqi in her situation hopes for. Sunshine writes:

On my birthday, I came home, had lunch, and decided to take a nap, because I couldn't sleep well at night … as soon as I laid on my bed a [gun] fight started behind the house, (about 30 meters away), of course my wish in my birthday was to stay alive.

I thought “to run, or to stay???!” then I remembered the saying “what hits me wasn't suppose to miss me, and what miss me wasn't suppose to hit me; so I put the pillow on my head and a blanket, and fall asleep!!!! I was so tired.

At 4 pm I heard singing “ HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU” , I opened my eyes and saw my family members around the bed singing, it was really funny and special I blew my candles while I was still in bed ..

End life, killed laughter

Breathless, hopeless, and fatigue
That's what I am now..

I am between the devil and the deep blew see
and between them

I am wishing I am never be…

poem by HNK on her life now in Mosul

Mosul on the edge

Aunt Najma explains the situation in Mosul like no one else can:

In short very little is going right, and the situation in Mosul is going from really bad to much worse.

During the exams period, and in the course of one week, two professors in the university were killed in their way back from their colleges. One was killed in front of his children as they were with him in the car, and the other in front of his son who also got a bullet from the attack but survived it. …

It is a bad dream, but that's it, it doesn't end. You just have to live through it and put all your feelings in some jar because they won't do you any good.

ِDuring the exams a car bomb exploded in our street and broke some of the windows.. And during the exams, and in the midst of the mess, they decided to change the flag. And they did. And we the people didn't have a say in this.. They're just way too wise to be true.

Now it's the break.. and I hate breaks.. I'm sitting here at home waiting for the decisive battle on Mosul.. I'm waiting for them to come search the house.. and I do not feel like writing, so excuse me.

Sunshine reports that the past three weeks have been “very very very hard“:

I felt afraid from staying alone at night because the shelling didn't stop and we didn't have electricity, it is hard to admit that 16 years old Sunshine was afraid to stay alone at night! The new operation against Al-qaida will begin soon.

She gives her account of the huge explosion which I reported before but she adds the stories which made her “feel how great people the Iraqis are”:

I heard [on] the radio, when A man said “ I was in the hospital in the day of explosion, and I saw the ambulances bringing people injured very badly, I wanted to help but didn’t know what to do, so I took my car, went to a neighborhood and started to shout, “an explosion happened in a neighborhood, many people were injured, is there any one willing to donate with blood?” and I came to the hospital with about 25 guys”

Many people called and adopted the orphans, many people donated with money, clothes, & medicines, my mom and her friend called every dentist they knew collected money to the wounded people.
A man called the radio and his words touched my heart he said “I don’t have money to give, but I’ll work for free and re-build the destroyed houses and shops“ and he gave the reporter his number, the world needs more people like him.

Meanwhile in Basra…

Hussain went to visit his relatives. For readers not faimiliar with the city, here is Hussain's description:

I love Basra city, which lies in the far south of Iraq and in the north of the Arab gulf. So it has the sea and harbors which we don't have in all over the country in addition to its people who are well known for their generosity and hospitality. … More than 75 % of the budget comes from Basra.

The strange thing is that all Iraqi ports lie in Basra which means that all imported stuff from Asia and some European countries and exported oil to them should be through the Arab gulf and Basra! If Basra depends only on taxes which come from harbors, it should have skyscrapers everywhere.

But he was shocked to find the city neglected by the government in every way and rife with corruption:

the road from the main Harbor … to Basra city is unsafe for driving as the pavement is not good and bumpy due to the careless it has. This is a simple thing, while hospitals, factories and infrastructures are neglected or broken in this city. …

I went to Umm Filous harbor (about 30 km south of Basra), which is used to be a commercial one, but it becomes the harbor of oil smugglers.. When I asked my companion about the matter, who is from Basra city, he said” We have smugglers from Iran, Thailand, Malaysia, UAE , India and everywhere who deal with counterparts in Iraq with million dollars per day! I asked “Do the government know of this matter? The answer shocked me. “Most of the Iraqi smugglers are related to main parties in the government sharing the profits with them “he said.

Hussain concludes:

My question is now for the government, if the government can't control a small piece in the far south of Basra, how it can rule the whole country?

The conditions for women

Neurotic Iraqi Wife has a conversation with a colleague who lives outside the Green Zone where Neurotica works. Her friend explains why she must go to work everyday dressed in black and with her head covered:

“I have no other choice “Neurotica”. Its either I cover up or I get killed

“Oh Neurotica, this is happening everywhere in Iraq, not just in Basrah or here but everywhere. We have become easy targets for those animal extremists”. The sadness in her voice slowly turned into anger. “Yes we suffered under Saddam’s regime, but atleast then, we knew who to blame. Now Neurotica, now, we don’t even know who to point the finger at? The Sadr Militias? The Badr Brigades? The Al Qaeda Wahabi extremists? Who do we blame Neurotica? Even the US forces are guilty.

“I don't even know if my neighbour will tell on me, or my friend. Or that old man I buy the vegetables from. Or that small boy sitting in the corner begging. I don't know who will shoot me first. The militia? The police? The Americans? Or maybe a drug addict, or a drunk man? Who is it gonna be? If it wasn't for my elderly parents I would have left long long time ago.

… “nothing has changed. Nothing at all. In Saddam’s time, we lived in fear, and now, we STILL live in fear. Do you think its possible for things to become normal again? Ever?”

Neurotic Wife concludes:

It angers me to see how these women suffer just because they ARE women.

…In my eyes, those women, those constantly supressed Iraqi women, are my true heroes. All they witnessed is constant sorrow and pain, yet their constant hunger for survival puts everyone to shame. Everyone, including me. I send my love and utmost respect to these women. These tough, resilient Iraqi Women. The women behind the Abbayas and Veils.

And Finally…

Imad Khadduri found on an Iraqi Classified Ad's website a photo of what must be Iraq's oldest Hell's Angel:

The mother of all Harleys

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Growing Up Blogging in Rural Uruguay

David Sasaki · 21:01

Originally posted on Rising Voices.

Rising Voices grantee Pablo Flores, who is in charge of the implementation of the One Laptop Per Child program in Uruguay, believes that the XO laptop is more than just an educational tool. He also sees the lime green laptops as an important communication device which he hopes will allow all Uruguayan students to be heard by the rest of their country and participate in the online conversations which will affect their future.

On YouTube, there is an 11-minute video of the veterinarian-assisted birth of a calf on a farm in Villa Cardal, Uruguay, a small town in a dairy-rich region four hours north of the capital, Montevideo. It’s an amazing thing to watch—at least, to a city slicker like me who doesn’t get to witness the miracle of birth every day. But what makes this particular video remarkable is that it was shot by a fourth-year student at Villa Cardal’s Public School 24, using the built-in camera and recording software on the student’s XO Laptop, within weeks of the machine’s arrival at the school last year.

Wade Roush 2/1/08

Perhaps just as amazing is that the low-production (that is, zero-production) video has already been viewed by nearly 40,000 individuals. How did a lower-middle class rural Uruguayan fourth-grader learn to take video of a cow giving birth and share it with so many people across the globe?.

Villa Cardal is a rural town of around 1,300 residents in the department of Florida, Uruguay. Last May it became the unlikely destination for dozens of technology correspondents from major media outlets around the world after the One Laptop Per Child project chose it as a testing site for for their XO computer, formerly called the $100 laptop. (Each laptop actually cost the Uruguayan government $205.)

You can get to know Villa Cardal better in Google Earth or, to a lesser degree, with Google Maps. You can also check out many photographs of the town which were taken by students in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade using their XO laptops. I am personally a fan of this photograph as I tend to make the same face when staring into a webcam.

Rising Voices grantee Pablo Flores, who is the technical and educational coordinator for OLPC's implementation in Villa Cardal and throughout the province of Florida, has also posted some interesting videos of Villa Cardal and the young students using their XO laptops on his YouTube page.

During the OLPC's pilot project in Villa Cardal, the Uruguayan government was also testing out the Intel's Classmate PC. In early October, after intense negotiations which brought the XO laptop down to $205 compared to the Classmate PC's price tag of $258, the Uruguayan government ordered 100,000 XO laptops with an option to buy 50,000 more at $199 per unit.

Two months later and the first non-pilot deployment of XO laptops was launched at Escuela No. 109 in rural Florida. The laptops in Villa Cardal were also replaced with new XOs with updated hardware and software. The OLPC project in general, and its first deployment in the Uruguayan province of Florida specifically, have both attracted a good deal of international criticism. The most common critique is that the $205 per student would better used elsewhere; for example, on the renovation of shoddy schoolhouses, the purchase of textbooks, or the salaries of underpaid teachers. Another common criticism is that the laptops won't be effectively used by teachers, who will probably have a more difficult time than their students in adapting to the new technology.

For those interested in how those criticisms specifically applied to the 6 month pilot phase of the OLPC project in Villa Cardal, you could do no better than reading “Reflections on a Pilot OLPC Experience in Uruguay” by Juan Pablo Hourcade, Daiana Beitler, Fernando Cormenzana, and Pablo Flores. The paper is largely optimistic, but its authors do note that:

While the Uruguayan government is making a great effort in providing funding for the hardware, there is no funding for designing and developing software and content for use with the laptops. We are interested in developing technology to help setup and facilitate partnerships between local communities, schools (children and teachers), software developers and funding sources to foster the user-centered design, development and evaluation of open source software and open content for the XO laptops.

Another excellent resource for frank feedback about the value and challenges that those lime green laptops brought to Villa Cardal comes straight from the students' parents and teachers. Again, we mostly encounter gratitude and optimism, but parents do note that the laptops have been the cause of some arguments between siblings while teachers observe that some of the students become distracted in class by focusing more on their computers than the classroom activity. Flores also writes, “The phrase ‘… and we are waiting for Internet' was repeated by most of the parents. Teachers also had some difficulties with Internet, because apparently not all the time there's good connectivity inside the school.”

What kind of content are the young students producing with their laptops? Much more, it turns out, than just videos of birthing cows. You can find out yourself by taking a look at the classroom blogs for grades one, two, three, four, five, and six at Villa Cardal's Escuela Italia. (As the new semester has just started, most of the blogs have not been updated since before the holiday vacation.)

For Pablo Flores the XO laptops are much more than an educational tool; they are also an important communication device which he hopes will allow all Uruguayan students to be heard by the rest of their country and participate in the online conversations which will affect their future. Flores' Rising Voices project, Bloggers Desde la Infancia or “Growing Up Blogging” will organize four series of workshops in strategic rural locations throughout Uruguay. These gatherings will bring the young XO-toting students and their teachers together with national and international veteran bloggers, podcasters, and producers of online video. They will go over intermediate and advanced blogging techniques, how to add meta information to the photographs they upload to the web, how to create conversational video threads using YouTube responses, and much more.

As Flores wrote on his project proposal [es]:

Creemos que hay una enorme potencialidad de extraer información rica desde todos los rincones del país, involucrando a los maestros, los niños y sus familias. Esto brindará una gran riqueza de visiones sobre las noticias, la cultura, el quehacer y todas las expresiones de la realidad desde todos los rincones del país. Es una oportunidad para promover la real integración del país a la sociedad de la información. Creemos también que la experiencia de Uruguay puede servir de referencia para otros países que estén impulsando modelos educativos de un computador por niño (1:1).

We believe that there is an enormous potential to bring out rich information from all of the corners of the country, involving the teachers, the children, and their families. This will put forth a richness of stories and narratives about the news, culture, daily tasks, and all the expressions of reality from around the country. It is an opportunity to promote the real integration of the entire country with the information society. We also believe that the experience in Uruguay can serve as a reference for other countries that are launching educational programs based on the one laptop per child model.

Obviously, before organizing the participatory media workshops, Flores is first overseeing the complete distribution of the laptops in rural schools throughout Florida and the rest of Uruguay. He says the series of workshops will likely take place throughout July and October, though that many of the OLPC schools will have their own classroom blogs before then.

I will be visiting Villa Cardal and many of the other OLPC deployments in Uruguay throughout the month of April. We'll make sure to bring Rising Voices readers more updates and videos as the months go on.

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Hindi Blogosphere: Ad Revenue, Bollywood and other stories

Amit Gupta · 19:47

lingua → bn · es

A number of bloggers writing in English have no problem in putting up adverts and a lot of them generate decent enough revenue from their blogs. But the problem comes when you don't blog in English but in some other language as your advertising options start narrowing down. Ad revenue from programs like Google AdSense is just about nil when it comes to Hindi blogging.

The only Hindi websites generating any decent or good revenue are either big news websites of media houses or bigger and popular portals almost all of whom get advertisers from direct sources than an ad program like AdSense. But things will improve for the better, reckons Jitendra Chaudhary in his interview with Bol Halla. Popularly known as Jitu in the Hindi blogosphere, the current administrator and co-founder of popular Hindi blog aggregator Narad, he reckons that Hindi bloggers should write on specialized topics and carve a niche out for themselves.

He thinks that a boom will soon come in Hindi websites and that the coming big websites will require good content and Hindi bloggers can fulfill the demand. It's also a point to be taken into consideration that off late Hindi language ads have started appearing in general public use ad programs like Google AdSense and that soon direct advertisers will also start approaching popular blogs.

And if you believe some, then popular yoga guru Baba Ramdev has got competition from none other than the gorgeous Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty (yes, the one who won Big Brother show in UK) who recently released her own DVD on yoga!! ;) And thats not all; some gossip says that the Bollywood actress Mallika Sherawat demanded a fee of INR 10 million from a producer for doing a song in his movie and the producer got out of there so fast that he could've put The Flash to shame!! ;)

As Harshawardhan tells us, the Allahabad University is celebrating 121 years of its establishment and is hosting a big alumni meet on 16th, 17th & 18th February 2008, an international affair with some gala events and symposiums.

Links courtesy: Narad

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Japan: Coming-Out Letters

Hanako Tokita · 14:10

lingua → jp · es

The Japanese LGBT community has come a long way to claim its position in society today. However, aside from those flamboyant celebrities on TV who satisfy viewers' appetite for entertainment, the voices of sexual minorities are still rarely heard or amplified – perhaps more so in the case of those who support and share their life with them.

“Coming-Out Letters” is a compilation of letters exchanged between lesbian and gay children and their parents, students and their teachers, edited by two prominent Japanese LGBT activists, RYOJI and Sunagawa Hideki. What distinguishes this new publication from much of the LGBT literature previously published is that it exposes not only the experiences of the children/students but also how parents and teachers faced, handled and overcame their children/students coming out to them. Since its publishing in December, the book has inspired many bloggers to share their responses to the book as well as their personal thoughts and experiences.

Fushimi Noriaki, a gay writer, sums up his impression of the book:

カミングアウトとは一方的に少数者の側がするものではなく、それを受け止める側とのコミュニケーションのことを言う（べきだ）。本書はそういう意味では、初めてカミングアウトを立体的にとらえた一冊になっている。差別に置かれながらも可能性に開かれている日本のゲイやレズビアンの「いま」を、見事に映し出しているだろう。

Coming out is (or should be) spoken of not as something the minority does in an arbitrary way, but as communication with the receiving side. In this sense, this book is the first to stereoscopically capture people's coming-out [experience]. I think it wonderfully exposes the “present” of Japanese gays and lesbians who, even while confronted by discrimination, have a space of possibilities opening before them.

Other bloggers shared their personal views and thoughts on the topic. Blogger Yu considers what the act of coming out means to him:

ともあれ僕は、家族にはカミングアウトできていません。クリスチャン・ホームだから、っていうのも、理由の一端になきにしも非ず。ですが、それよりもむしろ大きいのは、両親の「孫に絵本を読んで聞かせたい」という希望、両祖母の「孫の結婚式が見たい・ひ孫の顔が見たい」という希望を、昔から浴びて育ってきたから。です。
そしてなによりも、自分がこんなにも愛されて育てられてきたことを、心の底から実感しているから。いつか言わなきゃ、いつか言わなきゃ、と、思いながらも、言えないまま、ここまで生きてきました。[…]

Anyway, in my case, I haven't been able to come out to my family. I cannot deny the fact that coming from a Christian home is one of the reasons. However, more so, I think it's because I grew up with my parents wishing “we want to read books to grandchildren” and both my grandmothers wishing “want to see my grandson's wedding, want to see great-grandchildren”.
And above all, it's because I feel from the bottom of my heart that I grew up with so much love. I have lived my life until now always thinking that I have to tell them, I have to tell them some day.[…]

[…]
自分が誰のことを好きなのか、誰と生きていくことを願うのか。
子どもが誰のことを好きなのか、誰と生きていくことを願うのか。
本当は、ただそれだけの話。でも、自分の／子どもの生の核にも関わってくる、大切な話。
だからこそ、言いたい。だからこそ、言えない。だからこそ、話をしては悔やみ、話を聞いては怯える。
それが、カミングアウトをする、ということなんだと思う。

でもやっぱり、ただ苦しくて切ないだけが、カミングアウトする、っていうことじゃない。

[…]
Who do I like, who do I wish to live with.
Whom your child likes and who he/she wishes to live their life with.
The truth is, it's just about that. But this is something important that comes down to the core of your and your child's life.
That's why I want to say this. That's why I cannot say this. That's why I regret after telling, and fear after hearing.
That, I think, is what coming out is about.

But still, coming out is not just about bitterness and heartaches.

[…]
こんな自分だけど、あなたと一緒にこれからも生きて行きたい。
どんなあなたでも、あなたと一緒にこれからも生きて行きたい。
そんな風に互いを想いやり、確かめ合い、新しい関係を、これまでの関係を、これからも生きていくこと。
そのことを深く刻みこむことが、カミングアウトをする、ということなんだと思う。

This is the way I am but I want to live my life with you for years to come.
Whatever kind of person you are, I want to live my life with you for years to come.
To think about and recognize each other, and to live with new relationships and old relationships.
To chisel these things deeply in my heart, I believe, is what coming out is about.

Another blogger, Akaboshi, shares his thoughts as well:

僕のような同性愛者が近親者にカミングアウトをためらう時って、「拒絶されて自分が傷つきたくない」のと同じくらい、「相手を傷つけたくない」という気持ちが働くのではないかと思う。同性しか好きになれないという自分の本性から、逃げ続けた思春期の経験がそうさせる。自分ですら大変だった思いを、なんで年老いた親に背負わせなければならないのか。そういう思いがあることは否定できない事実だ。もともとは社会に蔓延するホモフォビア（同性愛嫌悪）が原因なのだけど。

When a homosexual person like me is hesitant about coming out with their close family, I think the thinking is as much that “I don't want to hurt them” as it is that “I don't want to get hurt”. This is a result of my own experience during my adolescent years continuously escaping from my true self, a self that can love only a person of the same sex. Why do I have to impose a hardship that was already difficult enough for me onto my old parents. I cannot deny the fact that I have these kinds of feelings. The source [of the problem], though, is the prevalence of homophobia in society.

カミングアウトってものは、する相手との関係が近ければ近いほど、もしも壊れてしまった場合のリスクが大きい。だから失敗した場合にフォローが出来るかどうか自信が持てない限り、躊躇するのは仕方のない事だと思う。それを「だらしない」とか「意気地なし」とか強者の論理で責めたてるのは勝手だけど、世の中強い人ばかりではないことを、僕は自分を通して知っている。強くなってしまうと見えなくなってしまうことも、あるのではないかと思ったりする。同性愛者に生まれついたということだけでも結構シンドイのに、なぜ「カミングアウト」という行為をせねばならないという重圧まで背負い込まされなければならないのかと、本音では思ったりすることもある。

The closer you are to the person you want to come out to, the greater the danger there is to the relationship. So unless you are sure about how to handle the situation in case you fail, I think it is natural to be hesitant. You can take up the argument of the strong and criticize my saying this as being “coward” or as “wimpy”, but I know from my own experience that there are not only strong people in this world. I think there are things that you can't see when you become strong. Being born as gay itself is tough enough, why do I have to take on the pressure of having to go through the experience of “coming out” — this is what I think in my heart sometimes.

On the other hand, yejin compares her experience of being and “coming out” as zainichi:

マイノリティが抱える葛藤という点においては、「在日」とも共通する課題や問題を感じて、共感することが多々ありました。

しかし、彼らにとって大きな問題は、おそらく誰にとっても一番身近で、もっとも自分のことを理解してもらいたい、受け入れてもらいたいと思う相手である親に対して、なかなかカミングアウトできない、しても受容されないという現実があることだと思います。

ゲイやレズビアンの人は、強固な一般的社会通念という壁にはばまれ、うちのめされることが多いのではないか？　傷ついて誰にも明かせず自分を肯定できず生きているのではないか？　そう思うと胸がしめつけられます。

In terms of the struggles of minorities, I see a lot of similar challenges and problems relating to Zainichi, so I felt a lot of sympathy.

However, their problem perhaps is the fact that they cannot easily come out to their parents, by whom they want to be understood and accepted the most, and that even if they do come out they are not accepted.

Doesn't it seem that gays and lesbians often get thwarted by an impregnable wall of social notions? Doesn't it seem that they live their life unable to tell anyone, unable to be positive about themselves? When I think about these things, it breaks my heart.

何より自分を生んで育ててくれた親や、親しい友人たちを偽り、本当の自分を隠し通し続けるのは、心に大きな負担を背負って生きることだと思います。

でも日本社会は決してセクシャルマイノリティにとって優しい社会ではないと思います。親しい友人に対してであっても、いざカミングアウトしようとすれば、様々な反応を想定して心の準備をするに違いありません。

私も私なりに、友だちに「在日だよ」と話す時にはちょこっと勇気出してみたり、様々な反応に対する心構えをしたりします。それはそんなに深刻なものではないけど、間違いなく、いっこいっこの反応に対して自分の在りようを探ってきたかなーと思います。

More than anything, to have to continuously hide your true self from your parents, who gave birth to you, and from your close friends — this is like living with a huge burden on your heart.

However, I don't think Japan is a society that is friendly to sexual minorities. When trying to come out, even to close friends, I bet they have to prepare for every possible reaction.

In my case as well, when I tell my friends “I'm a zainichi”, I need a little bit of courage and have to prepare for different reactions. It's not really that serious or anything, but certainly I would like to think about how I should be in response to each possible question.

Special & warm thanks to Yu, blogger at Yuyu jiteki（悠々自的。), who kindly advised me on the topic and helped me put together the blog entries for this post.

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Morocco's coach sacked after Africa Cup loss

Lydia Beyoud · 10:02

lingua → es · bn

Two francophone Moroccan bloggers, Jamal Hafsi and Amazirghblog, respond to the recent sacking of the Moroccan national football team's coach, Henri Michel, following Morocco's poor performance in the African Nations Cup. Both place the blame on the Royal Moroccan Football Federation, and consider Michel a scapegoat.

Jamal Hafsi writes:

La Fédération Royale Marocaine de Football a congédié Henri Michel, le coach de l’équipe nationale.

Après la brève et peu flatteuse prestation de notre onze national à Accra et le tollé général qu’elle a soulevé dans tout le pays, il fallait bien évidemment faire sauter un fusible.

La fédération n’a pas été chercher très loin, et la solution et le fusible. Elle a fait, comme à son habitude, dans le plus simple et a offert la tête du coach.

Congédier Henri Michel peut effectivement faire baisser, pour un moment, la tension née du pitoyable parcours de nos lions au royaume des Ashantis. Elle n’occultera pas pour autant la véritable dimension du désastre dans lequel est empêtré le football national. Maigre consolation!

Auditionné par la commission des affaires sociales et du sport M’hamed Aouzal vice- président de la FRMF et président du GNF a tenté encore une fois de faire jouer les sempiternels faux fuyants et de noyer le poisson. Comme d’habitude…encore une fois.

Henri Michel n’est responsable de cette débâcle qu’à hauteur de ses mauvais choix tactiques pour cette phase finale de la CAN..

La FRMF, elle, est responsable de sa pitoyable gestion du football national depuis des lustres.

The Royal Moroccan Football Federation dismissed Henri Michel, the national team's coach.

After our national eleven's brief and hardly flattering performance in Accra and the general cries of indignation they raised throughout the country, it was obviously necessary to blow a fuse.

The federation didn't have to look very far to find both the solution and the fuse. As usual, they did the easiest thing and offered up the coach's head.

Putting Henri Michel into retirement may effectively, though only momentarily, reduce the tension born from our Lion's* pathetic round in the Ashanti kingdom. However, it won't be enough to obscure the real dimension of the disaster in which the national football has become entangled in. Not much of a consolation!

Auditioned by the Commission for Sport and Social Affairds M'hamed Aouzal, vice-president of the FRMF and president of the GNF [Groupement National de Football/National Football Rankings] once again tried to employ to endless misdirections and bamboozle the public. As usual…once again.

Henri Michel is only responsible for this disaster insofar as his bad tactical choices in this final phase of the ANC…

The FRMF [Royal Moroccan Football Federation] is the one responsible for the pathetic management of the national football team since their previous glory.

(*The Moroccan national football team is known as the “Lions de l'Atlas” or the “Lions of the Atlas Mountains.”)

In a similar vein, Amazirghblog writes:

Je trouve l'attitude de la Federation royale marocaine, totalement irresponsable!

Il ne s'agit pas de demettre un coach, mais de revoir tout le fonction de cette institution oculte!

Zaki, tres bon entraineur, en a fait les frais!

Tant qu'on aura les memes (ir)responsables à la tete de cette federation, on ne pourra tenir les coachs comme uniques responsables!

I find the Royal Moroccan [Football] Federation's attitude totally irresponsible!

They shouldn't be firing a coach, but reexamining the entire function of this occult institution!

Zaki, a very good coach, paid the price for it!

So long as we have the same (ir)responsible people at the head of this federation, we can't hold the coaches as the only people accountable!

1 comment · »»

Portnoy Zheng: The blogger who inspired the world to talk together

Paula Góes · 01:34

lingua → es

He is too humble to agree with me, but I'm in no way exaggerating when I say that Portnoy Zheng was the inspiration behind Global Voices' Lingua project, which has made selected Global Voices' articles available to a real global audience of Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, Farsi, French, Japanese, Malagasy, Portuguese, and Spanish speakers.

It all started back in 2005, when Global Voices was still taking off the English speaking ground. Portnoy fell in love with the idea and soon after started to translate and publish on his Chinese blog posts from GVO. The project soon found its own home and later he recruited some Chinese speaking volunteers to help translate Global Voices content into traditional and simplified Chinese, the third language on the blogosphere.

Now people from Madagascar can hear voices from Korea, and the Arabian blogosphere can echo a story from China. It is the surpassing of GVO's language barrier, thanks to a system inspired by Portnoy's initiative, hard work and motivation. There are also German and Hindi sites coming out, and the more websites set up, the more the world converses and people understand each other.

Portnoy began collaborating as a volunteer translator for Lingua in June 2006 (after having translated more than 100 posts on his own) and soon after became a Global Voices author, reporting on the Taiwanese blogosphere, which is focused mainly on travel and technology, and some politics. And now that he has a tiny bit more time after finishing the mandatory 18 months military service required for all Taiwanese young men, he is planning to start up a very interesting project. Read on!

New Year's celebrations in Taiwan

Happy New Year, Portnoy! What are your wishes for the Year of the Rat?

I have a lot of wishes. I wish all the GVO companions good fortune and good luck in the New Year, wish GVO keeps on doing marvelously and wish all people in the world have more freedom of expression. I also wish my Dad good health since he is a 70-year-old boy who never follows medical prescription.

Could you tell us how the new year celebrations in Taiwan are different from those in mainland China? Is there any special flavor to it?

In Taiwan, people celebrate lunar new year in many ways. Family members will gather together at the Eve of New Year for a hearty dinner. Elders give youngsters “red envelopes” with money inside as a symbol of good fortune for the coming year. At midnight, fireworks and firecrackers light up the street and the sky although most of them are illegal. On the first day, people start to visit or call or message or email all their friends to wish them happy new year. On the second day, married daughters will come home to visit their families….

However, the atmosphere of celebration is losing quickly with each year's passing. More and more people just take new year as a usual 5 -day-long vacation. No dancing dragons and lions on the street anymore. No special TV programs except for re-airing Hollywood films and reality shows. Actually, if you are not shopping in a department store, you might not aware of that the New Year is here. I have no experience in mainland China during New Year's period, but I guess the feeling of New Year should be stronger there.

There are still a lot of people (and travel business) trying hard to restore the feeling of New Year in Taiwan or simply recreate it. However, I haven't got a chance to visit these sites, so…well, I hope there is new flavor for me this year, because I am planning to visit one of the traveling site.

Let's get to business. How long have you been blogging and why?

I started blogging in January, 2005. I was in my first year of Master degree in Telecommunication and Journalism then and I found blogging issues spreading quickly on the Internet, therefore I began to dig into these issues and wrote reports on blogging. Later I thought I should start a blog by myself since I was researching it. Gradually I found blog is a very powerful tool to know the world and to let the world know me. I learned a lot of knowledge about our society, our politic chaos, and activists who try to make some change. You will never access these knowledge on Taiwanese mainstream media. And I now also become an activist myself working with many social groups or NGOs to help them spread their ideas.

What do you blog about? How would you describe your blog in Chinese to someone who can't read it?

The main theme of my blog is media, especially new media (theory, business, guideline and experience). I also blog about my thoughts on politics, technologies, news, and life. Sometimes I just put funny and crazy videos from video sites to make my readers happy.

I am an online activist dreaming of world peace–and I believe my blog reflects that.

You haven't updated lately Working Man, your ‘hyperpersonal blog in English'. Is it just a matter of finding the time?

Actually, I spend most of my leisure time updating my Chinese blog or playing with new web 2.0 services in order to find out the missing link between high-tech and low-democratic level in Taiwan, so TIME is a big problem. The minor problem is that I don't want to blog the same old topics that were in my Chinese blog already on my English blog….I guess I just have to stop Chinese blogging to initiate English blogging.

Could you tell us a bit more about these attempts to find the missing link between high-tech and low-democratic levels in Taiwan? What is it about?

People probably know that Taiwan is one of the countries (or economic entities if you don't think Taiwan is a country) that enjoy highest level of free expression in the world. And Taiwan is also the most important 3C (computer, communication, consumer electronics) producer in the world. We scores high on the ranking of e-commerce and e-government. We have very high broadband penetration (about 70 per cent) and maybe the highest cell-phone penetration in the world (above 100 per cent for many years). We have more than ten local 24-hour news channel broadcasting on cable and digital TV platform. But, the result of the combination of all these is that we have a lot of consumers but no citizens, at least not enough. Many bloggers like me have been doing experiment of citizen journalism for years, but our achievement is rather small comparing to the chaos created by our MSM and politicians. There seems to be a bottleneck, and that is what I am trying to figure out.

As a researcher in Citizen Journalism, how would you describe the difference it is making to Taiwan? How reliable is mainstream media there?

Citizen journalism in Taiwan is facing two obstacles that might sound creepy to others. One obstacle is that our mainstream media have cultivated Taiwanese too deep that they don't know what to trust and therefore treat news as entertainment. Yes, people here in Taiwan love watching news channels because they love entertainment and entertainment is the only thing they get, in fact. People don't treat news and journalists seriously so why would people try to do journalism on their own? The other obstacle is that mainstream media doesn't treat citizen journalism seriously, too. So the idea of citizen journalism isn't propagating that fast as in other countries with similar democracy and Internet penetration.

Are the any other problems that bloggers face in Taiwan, such as freedom of speech? I know that Chinese bloggers can not access Taiwanese blogs…

Freedom of speech is not a problem to Taiwanese bloggers. There are some legal restrictions such like “no alcohol and cigarette promotion are allowed”, “websites containing contents only for adults should put a sign onto themselves”….nothing really serious and nobody is taking these restrictions seriously. Most of the Taiwan BSPs are over-blocked by GFW of China because the most part of blogosphere is about life , traveling, emotion, funny jokes and cartoons… as the situation in every blogosphere elsewhere in the world. It is a great pity that bloggers across the strait cannot embrace full connection through the web. However, it is completely OK for Taiwanese blogger to visit China blogosphere (if it is not blocked in its own country), so I encourage Taiwanese bloggers to access more China bloggers more often and to make some friends with each other. I personally get acquainted with many bloggers based in China in this way.

Considering that Taiwan gets only little media attention in the international press, how important is it for the Taiwanese blogosphere to show the world a little bit more about their country?

Taiwanese are worrying about this very much. Our international status is suppressed by China government. We are prohibited from being apart of U.N., W.H.O., and all the global organizations that need an ID as a country. Taiwanese people always feel sad and sometimes anguished because Taiwan is never mentioned by international press except when there is a new bloody fight happening in our Congress.

But Taiwanese news media is also responsible for this situation since they don't educate their audience about the world. Our commercial news channels are sometimes even more limited than what international press does to Taiwan. So, many Taiwanese bloggers shoulder that responsibility to tell their readers much more about the globe–in Chinese. Most of these bloggers are students, travelers, immigrants, and social activists. However, few bloggers are doing the opposite–to tell the world what Taiwan really is. Actually I don't know any Taiwanese blogger outside Chinese lingua team who is doing such work. There are several English native speaking bloggers with Taiwanese ID or studying in Taiwan doing great jobs like Michael Turton, but the communication between the two Taiwanese blogospheres is very limited because of language restrictions I guess.

What is your most memorable blogging experience?

I would say that the last election period of Taipei city council in Dec, 2006 is my most unforgettable blogging experience. Several blogger friends and I (most are Chinese Lingua translators and supporters) start a volunteer election campaign for Green Party, a very small political party for environmental and social justice. We gathered almost every A-list blogger in Taiwan to support Green Party's candidates publicly on his or her own blog. Although the result is disappointing, that is the first web 2.0 campaign ever in Taiwan political history.

I thought you were going to say that it was translating GVO posts! What motivated you to do it?

I fell in love with GVO at first sight. But then I haven't got the idea to translate it. I just read it and hoped more and more Taiwanese netizens would get to know it, because I believed that as long as more Taiwanese know more about the world, the people of the world, the thoughts of these people, they will be freed from the cage built by creepy MSM in Taiwan and therefore growing compassion and happiness like what I had experienced. One day, a prominent blogger, inertia, wrote about GVO in his blog, gave me this idea of translation. I am an easily motivated person so I just began translating.

And from your idea, the Lingua arm of GVO was born. What do you think about the project and what are your expectations for the Global Voices translated sites?

I won't say that Lingua is my idea. I am merely a man who want more people in my community to know GVO. This is a simple and direct thought that everyone could have think of. Lingua is born with the power and diligence of those great people I met in Delhi–Ethan Zuckerman, Rebecca MacKinnon, David Sasaki, Alice Baker…etc.–They make my dream come true. I love Lingua as it is right now. However, I would like to see each Lingua site become the axis of citizen journalism in each language community. Maybe Lingua would work closer with Rising Voices project, or other citizen journalism project in different regions.

Is it true that English and Taiwanese blog communities are largely independent of one another? Are there other bridge blogs that could be of interest to our public?

The fact is: yes. I am always expecting and encouraging more bridgebloggers to show up. I am also expecting myself to be one. However, that is not easy. There are still a lot of lessons for me to learn from the GVO community.

Now you have just finished the military service and have more free time, are there any interesting projects up your sleeve?

I am lucky to find a job right after I finished my mandatory military service. So I'll be digging into it for some time to get accustomed to it. However, I am still a easily motivated blogger (ha), so I am going to start a new blog project called “Blue Camp” which focus on Information policy and digital solutions. The Presidential election of Taiwan is heating up and I want those candidates to give me and all the people who care about these topics their answers to them. Will they really care about blogger's ideas? I don't know, but I am just going to do it.

Portnoy Zheng